Jeffrey Lesser

Jeffrey Lesser is an U.S. based historian of Latin America who, as of 2010, is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor and chair of the History Department at Emory University. Prior to that he was the Winship Distinguished Professor of the Humanities. He is the author of numerous books on ethnicity, immigration and national identity in Brazil.

Lesser studied at Brown University (BA 1982; MA 1984) and then gained a Ph.D. in Latin American history at New York University (1989) where he studied with the late Warren Dean. He was the Fulbright Chair of the Humanities at Tel Aviv University and also has held visiting professorships at the University of São Paulo and the State University of Campinas. In 2015 Lesser was named Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the University of São Paulo with a project on the historical relationship between disease and migration in Brazil.

He is the author of numerous prize-winning books in English and Portuguese including,Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question, Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil, and A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese-Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy. In 2013 Lesser released Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil, 1808 to the Present, which was revised and published in Brazil as A invenção da brasilidade: Identidade nacional, etnicidade e políticas de imigração.